The investment will help Walker and Co. expand into Target stores starting next year.
Walker
The downtown Palo Alto office of Walker and Co., the two-year-old cosmetics company founded by former Foursquare exec Tristan Walker, doesn't look like much — white walls and few design flourishes, a tech-office standard open plan and affinity for Macs — but it smells incredible: Like lavender and black tea, with the faintest little hint of mango. It's less candle-store cloying than like a very elegant person's bathroom, and it is, to use an industry cliche, delightful.
Walker is certainly a tech guy — in addition to the Foursquare stint, he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, and he's also long been a favorite at South by Southwest and on tech Twitter. But Walker and Co. is far from a traditional tech shop. His flagship product isn't software, or even hardware; rather, it's a very beautiful single-blade razor (plus attendant creams and accessories), called Bevel, that is designed to, in Walker's words, "eradicate shaving irritation" in coarse-haired (meaning mostly, but not entirely, black) men.
That's not, however, to say that Walker and Co. doesn't raise money like a tech company. On Monday, the company announced that it had raised $24 million in Series B funding; the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with the participation of various valley VC firms — Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, several others — as well as a veritable murder's row of celebrity investors, including basketball players Andre Iguodala and Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Vine star King Bach, singer John Legend, and San Francisco 49ers CEO Jed York. The company also announced that Bevel will be sold in some Target stores and on Target.com, starting next year.
Last spring, the company raised nearly $7 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz; according to Walker, he still has a lot of that in the bank, "so we didn't really need to raise." But he clearly has big ambitions for the company, which he is fond of likening to a sort of Procter & Gamble for people of color. This new round will help with a three-pronged expansion that includes the Target deal, a hiring push (especially in customer service and engineering), and, in 2016, a new brand. Walker was coy about the details of that new brand, but he stressed that — true to the Procter & Gamble vision — Walker and Co was never intended to be just Bevel but several different brands, all targeting consumers of color.
"The thing that we proved with our first brand is that we can actually develop a suite of products that solve a really important problem that has existed for 100 years and no one has solved," Walker told BuzzFeed News. "So we're going to continue to iterate on that. Each of these subbrands will have their own personality, but still have the Walker and Co. values. For example, a lot of women use our product. Could there be a better profile for that use case?"
There's clearly room for Walker and Co. to grow. Walker pointed out that while health and beauty is a $400 billion industry, it's one that has historically underserved people of color. Meanwhile, according to a 2013 Nielsen report, "blacks consistently place a higher emphasis on grooming and beauty categories and at the top of that list is Ethnic Hair and Beauty Aids (HABA), which Blacks purchase nine times more than others."
Which is certainly part of why Walker was able to attract this round of investment, but Walker says many of his investors had been fans of Bevel before opening their wallets.
"Most of those folks are also consumers of our product," Walker said. "One thing that's really important [with celebrities] is not just using them for their reach. What's great about most of our investors is, they all walked down the same aisles I had to walk down. They picked up the same dirty packaging that I had to pick up. And they're interested in solving the problem we're trying to solve."
"[The investor pool] is diverse because I want it to be," Walker, who is also cofounder of Code2040, a nonprofit that creates "access, awareness, and opportunities" for young African-American and Latino/a engineers, continued. "Walker and Co. is majority minority, majority women, all great leaders, and I wanted my investor base to reflect not only the diversity of our team but the diversity of our customers, too."
What about the smell, though? Is it a collective and uncommonly good sense of personal hygiene among Walker's staff of 20? Do they spray something in the air?
"I think," Walker said, joking, "it's just our being awesome."
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